1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to information processing technology, and more particularly, to a method and system for registering a CIM agent to a management agent and management system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Web Services for Management (hereinafter referred to as “WS-Man” for short) is a management model released jointly by a number of Information Technology (IT) companies, and is a specification of realizing IT system management by using a Web service standard. WS-Man provides functionality of accessing and exchanging management information on an IT architecture based on the Web service standard to reduce management cost and complexity. By using Web services to manage the IT system, the IT system supporting WS-Man enables the IT administrator to remotely access the network components on its network from silicon components, handheld equipment, servers and large data centers, for example. In order to provide support for the WS-Man specification, many current operating systems contain components for providing WS-Man functions. With the continuous development of IT systems, the use of WS-Man functions is anticipated to increase.
Alternatively the Common Information Model (CIM) is another common management model released by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and is a specification for describing the information of a management object. CIM uniformly defines the objects in the computer system management domain so as to describe the information of objects, such as network equipment, system, application programs, and the like in the management domain irrespective of a specific implementation such that the information can be used for other management tools.
The CIM standard is divided into two parts: the CIM specification and CIM schema. The CIM standard provides a formal definition of the model and is used for language description, naming, meta schema and the mapping technology to other management models. The CIM schema gives the description of the actual model. The CIM model is independent of any specific database, application, protocol and platform and can describe information such as desktop software and hardware configuration, the serial number of CPU package blocks and the flow level on a certain router port in specification form. At present, many IT corporations have widely adopted the CIM standard.
Due to the description capability of the CIM model to management objects, CIM models are integrated into many current management systems for use. In such management systems, when it is necessary to obtain the information of the management objects in the management domain in order to accomplish the specific system management tasks, the CIM schema is used to obtain the information of the management objects represented by the CIM model, and the management tasks are carried out based on the obtained information. The combination of the CIM model and the management system not only reinforces the function of the management system but also can expand the application scenario of the CIM model. This also applies to the above-mentioned WS-Man model, which can be used by integrating the CIM model.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of the existing architecture of the WS-Man model based management system built up with the CIM model. As depicted in FIG. 1, three parts make up such architecture, including the CIM agent, the WS-Man agent and a management application. The CIM agent is implemented according to the CIM specification, and is used to provide parts of CIM functions and access to such management objects as equipment, system, and application programs in the IT system. In addition, based on the CIM standard, the CIM agent creates the CIM schema for describing the information of these management objects and thus further manages these CIM schemas.
WS-Man agent is implemented according to the WS-Man specification, and is used to provide parts of WS-Man functions and communication with the CIM agent via CIM Extensible Markup Language (CIMXML) protocol so that it can obtain the information of the management objects represented by the CIM schema from the CIM agent. In addition, the management application is located at the client of the IT system and is a system management part specifically implemented on the basis of WS-Man agent. The management application communicates with the WS-Man by Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) so that the application can access and exchange management information via the WS-Man agent, thereby realizing the specific system management tasks. The relation between WS-Man agent and the management application is similar with that between the server and the client. The WS-Man agent corresponds to the server for providing the WS-Man functions, while the management application corresponds to the management interface that is located at the client and realizes specific system management function with the WS-Man function provided by the WS-Man agent.
The above architecture as shown in FIG. 1 realizes a combination of the CIM schema and the WS-Man model. However, in some situations it is necessary to introduce manual operation. In a first situation, before the WS-Man agent needs to use a certain CIM agent to obtain the information of the management objects, the user must manually register the CIM agent to the WS-Man agent, and then the WS-Man agent can obtain the CIM schema describing the information of the management objects via the registered CIM agent. In a second situation, when the WS-Man agent obtains the CIM schema through specific CIM agent, the user must define the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) schema corresponding to the CIM schema according to the WS-CIM specification and import the defined WSDL schema into the WS-Man agent so that they can be identified by the WS-Man agent that can only identify the WSDL model. The above WS-CIM specification defines the binding relation between the CIM resources with both the WS-Man operation and WSDL definition.
In the existing architecture as shown in the above FIG. 1, as the above aspects necessitate the introduction of manual operation, system efficiency and convenience for the user are restricted. In addition, as in the acquisition of the CIM schema, it is necessary for user to define the corresponding WSDL schema according to the CIM schema, thus the user is required to sufficiently understand the above WS-CIM specification defining the corresponding relationship between CIM information and WSDL denotation, which may require user to have an extensive knowledge of technology.